In general, a silver halide color photographic material is fundamentally processed by a color developing step and a desilvering step after imagewise exposure to light. In the color developing step, the exposed silver halide in the color photographic material is reduced to form silver and at the same time the oxidized color developing agent in the color developer reacts with color formers (couplers) in the color photographic material to form dye images. Silver formed in this manner is oxidized by a bleaching agent in the subsequent desilvering step, further converted into a soluble silver complex by the action of a fixing agent, and dissolved off
Recently in this field, quickening of processing, that is, shortening of the time required for photographic processing has been strongly desired and shortening of the desilvering step (which usually takes up about half of the overall processing time) has become an attractive area to researchers.
As a method of increasing the bleaching power, there are certain descriptions of bleach accelerating compound releasing couplers in Research Disclosure, No. 4241, ibid., No. 11449, and Japanese Patent Application (OPI) No. 201247/86 (the term "OPI" as used herein indicates an "unexamined published Japanese patent application") and it is known that by using a silver halide photographic material containing such as a bleach accelerating compound releasing coupler, the desilvering property thereof is improved.
However, it has now been found that when a color photographic light-sensitive material containing the bleach accelerating compound releasing coupler is quickly processed in the desilvering step thereof, the recoloring property of cyan images is greatly deteriorated.
On the other hand, various cyan image-forming couplers, which are effective for improving the recoloring property of cyan images, are known (such as, for example, phenolic cyan couplers having a ureido group at the 2-position described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,333,999, Japanese Patent Application (OPI) Nos. 207593/82, 204544/82, and 2011863/83, naphtholic cyan couplers having an amido group at the 5-position described in Japanese Patent Application (OPI) Nos. 237448/85, 145557/86, and 153640/86, and 2,5-diacylaminophenol type cyan couplers, etc., in the field of color photographic papers) and also, in aforesaid Japanese Patent Application (OPI) No. 201247/86 relating to bleach accelerating compound releasing couplers, a 2-ureidophenolic cyan coupler having a 4-cyanophenyl group, which is one type of cyan image-forming couplers somewhat effective at improving the recoloring property, is used in an example.
However, it has also been found that since such 2-ureidophenol type cyan coupler having a 4-cyanophenyl group has a tendency to shift the absorption wavelength thereof to the longer wavelength side by the association of molecules when the concentration thereof is increased. Thus, the color photographic material using the cyan coupler changes its maximum absorption wavelength due to this difference in color density, whereby color images having satisfactory color balance are not obtained.